Friday, February 12, 2016

An Exercise In Puppy Socialisation And Comparative Psychogeography

Commercial Street, Brighouse

Two things happened yesterday which came together over a period of forty or fifty years (it would make for a better story if it was exactly fifty years but I wallow in impreciseness and enjoy it). In the morning I scanned a strip of old 35mm black and white negatives I must have shot forty or fifty years ago. They were street shots taken in Brighouse, West Yorkshire: shots that provide a documentary record of how the town looked at the time.

Briggate, Brighouse

In the afternoon it had been decided - by She Who Has Read The Puppy Book - that we needed to socialise Lucy (she is still not allowed to walk around in public until after her next lot of injections); and socialisation seemed to involve carrying the puppy around and pointing out things like where the Bus Station is and where the best pubs are.

The Prince of Wales / Old Ship Inn, Bethel Street, Brighouse

And so we found ourselves in the very same Brighouse and the most natural thing in the world seemed to be to quickly visit the same streets and see what had changed over the intervening years. It was an interesting experience which highlighted both change and continuity in equal municipal measures.

Thornton Square and Briggate, Brighouse

As an exercise in comparative psychogeography it might not cause many gravitational waves. But, for a few minutes, it got me out of carrying Lucy around Brighouse saying to her: "This is a bus, B .. U .. S, now say it after me ...."

7 comments:

That is probably true but photographic technology makes it difficult to get a perfect comparison. There was something about the focal length of 1960s lenses (and the same is true of earlier periods) which cannot be reproduced by modern digital cameras.

About Me

One time lecturer, writer on European Affairs and bus conductor, Alan Burnett now divides his time between walking the dog and a little harmless blogging. His News From Nowhere Blog has been running since 2006 and acts as a showcase for his ranting and writing and his photographs old and new.